Noam Chomsky Biography and Contributions

Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia, the older son of a professor of Hebrew who had emigrated from Russia in 1913.

From early childhood he always displayed linguistic carefulness

At 10 he was able to read his father’s edition of a Hebrew grammar of the 13th century

School life…

In 1945 Noam Chomsky enrolled at the University of Pennsylvania to study philosophy and Arabic while living at home and teaching at a Hebrew school

In his second 2 years of University his interest were more involved with socialism and Zionism (a worldwide Jewish movement that resulted in the establishment and development of the state of Israel.)

Noam wished he could of drop out of school to go to Israel and promote Arab-Jewish cooperation in a socialist framework

In 1949 (the year he married) he earned a B.A. with graduate courses in linguistics, philosophy, mathematics, and Hebrew

In 1955 Noam earned his Ph.D. in linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania for a thesis on “Transformational Analysis.”

Also in that year noam Chomsky became an assistant professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and in 1961, a full professor.

Teachings, opinions, philosophies…

Noam Chomsky’s description of his goal as a linguist: “To find the principles common to all languages that enable people to speak creatively and freely”

Chomsky’s work implies that an understanding of the rules of a language throws light on the principles that regulate human thought.

Noam’s challenging of traditional views of how language develops, is considered to have revolutionized the study of linguistics.

His first book, ‘Syntactic Structures’, published in 1957, outlines his system of transformational grammar. He also published ‘Manufacturing Consent’, the media is filter through a number of lenses before information reaches the public. And ‘Failed States’, a society ruled by corporate powers that work hand in hand with government to enlarge their own profits and suppress the needs and desires of a majority of the American people

He deeply mistrusts the US government, business and, yes, the press, all of which he sees as serving the same ingratiating capitalist system

Language, he has taught, is generated through an inborn ability in the individual. Once generated, language is liable to infinite creative variation

Chomsky has aimed to expose much of U.S. policy as a mask for irresponsible power and unjustified privilege, and he has insisted that the so-called free press promotes a ineffective conventionality in American intellectual life